If you’re reading Minnov8 you use, understand and undoubtedly rely upon the internet and your broadband connection. You may also be building a business or revenue stream upon the internet-as-a-platform for innovation, and as such you absolutely must stay close to net neutrality, FCC rulings and, most importantly, what our Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force is doing to meet their legislative mandate (the task force site is now live and definitely worth checking out).

Ironically in a day when early adopters, influencers and the Minnesota tech cognescenti long ago embraced RSS as an efficient means of staying informed easily, the task force site doesn’t even have a feed, but instead asks you to sign up for an “e-newsletter” (how quaint….but I digress).

Thankfully I follow the task force member representing Twin Cities interests, Mike O’Connor, and the UrbanBroadbandUsers blog via his RSS feed, and I was pleased to have a heads-up on the first meeting minutes (PDF) and, especially, his compiled links on today’s feed:

• CLICK HERE for the FCC document.
• CLICK HERE for Susan Crawford’s commentary
• CLICK HERE for Harold Feld’s commentary
• CLICK HERE for Larry Lessig’s letter to the FCC commending them on their decision.

If you do nothing else this weekend but invest even a half an hour reading these, you’ll have a pretty good handle on the issue, the importance of this August 1st ruling by the FCC, and why this matters to you if the internet is at all central to your life or you see it as important to your business or Minnesota’s future.

Anyone who understands that the internet is a platform, social media is fundamentally shifting the way we connect and communicate with one another, and that application and computing functionality is rapidly shifting to the cloud, will instantly appreciate the efforts of a broadband public policy initiative by the non-profit Blandin Foundation in Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Blandin on Broadband.

When I wrote a post analogically comparing what happened to a small Minnesota town bypassed by the railroad in the 1880’s, to the effect of being bypassed by ultra high speed broadband today, (see “The Railroad and Minnesota Broadband“), several people emailed me citing the following passage as the key reason why initiatives like Blandin’s Broadband one are so imperative for Minnesota, and specifically those towns and rural areas that lie outside the metro:

If you buy in to the premise that we’re living in a time of the greatest shift in communication and connection in history driven by the internet — and that the transport of digital bits is as important (if not more so) than the movement of physical goods over the past 100 years or so — it almost goes without saying that location is not only less important today, in many ways it’s irrelevant unless you don’t have access to the internet and fast access at that.

In 2003, Blandin crafted a vision (PDF) for Minnesota ultra high speed broadband “…designed to catalyze broadband investment and use, raise awareness about the value of broadband and encourage public and private investment in rural broadband capacity. Expanding the use of broadband technology increases the potential to retain jobs in rural areas, grows new markets for business, strengthens health care, enhances educational access and improves the quality-of-life” and I had a chance to interview Bill Coleman of Community Technology Advisors Corp. about what they’ve done, achieved, and what’s next….  [Read More…]

In 1868, the railroad bypassed Forestville, MN and the town died. The decline came slowly and over time my distant relatives, Thomas and Mary Meighen, saw the town dwindle, people move away, and they were left in an empty town with their farm and a general store attached to their home. Farm workers, paid in ‘chits’ to spend in that store, kept it open until 1908 when business in it came to a screeching halt as Thomas abruptly closed up shop — the last business in Forestville — with all the merchandise inside.

My Dad and his cousins tell stories of being kids on weekend holiday in the 1930’s, taken out to the farm to look around and rubbing the store windows so they could peek inside at all the old clothing, canned goods and assorted sundries, all left intact when Thomas locked the store and he and Mary moved to nearby Preston. Many of our other relatives moved there since Preston thrived when the railroad was built and passed through it instead of smaller Forestville to the south.

The Minnesota Historical Society later purchased their property (and what was left of the town) and turned it into a State Park, complete with interpretive storytellers in period costumes. It’s definitely worth a summer visit some weekend.

The lesson here is how important transportation was for physical goods in the late 1800’s during a time of shifting from a predominantly agrarian economy to one that was primarily industrial. The location of a railroad line dictated the fate of a town (though post-Civil War economic doldrums didn’t help). You may remember (or have heard stories about) how imperative it was for businesses to be “located on a siding” so railroad cars could load and unload easily, but what’s less obvious is the economic explosion that always accompanied the laying of track and the development which occurred alongside it, and how being bypassed by the railroad could doom a town or region.

If you buy in to the premise that we’re living in a time of the greatest shift in communication and connection in history driven by the internet — and that the transport of digital bits is as important (if not more so) than the movement of physical goods over the past 100 years or so — it almost goes without saying that location is not only less important today, in many ways it’s irrelevant unless you don’t have access to the internet and fast access at that.

What happens to your town if it’s bypassed by high-speed broadband like Forestville was by the railroad in 1868?

…  [Read More…]

When given the chance to be among the first couple of companies in the Twin Cities to receive an install of Comcast’s new DOCSIS 3.0-driven high speed service (50 megabits per second download speed and 5 megabits per second upload!), do you think they had to ask twice!?!

If you haven’t heard of DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) and don’t know why this is important, it’s the next generation of cable standards for delivering data over cable with theoretical speeds between 170mbps and 340mbps download with uploads speeds of 120mbps.

Comcast indicated that the Twin Cities is their first market to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 technology and is a clear demonstration of how the company is evolving from broadband to wideband. It’s also just the beginning of even faster speeds to come, they claim, but my 50/5 internet speed isn’t any demo….it’s real, working and fast.

My experiences thus far have been amazing. When we first started to use it after the install, I broke into a huge grin as pages loaded instantly and I ran a 345MB update which hit my downloads folder and completed in what seemed like two minutes (it actually downloaded so quickly I forgot to watch it and time it). I’ve been achieving ~40mbps down and 3.4 to 4.1 upload speeds on average (which, of course, are dependent upon so many variables like internet traffic, server load and so on).

Our business (and yours too, I’ll wager) now depends on the internet in the same way 20th century business depended on the phone and then the fax machine. Speed is money and with more of our applications in the “cloud” (i.e., hosted Web applications), an accelerating number of us living an always-on and always-connected lifestyle, coupled with the need to move ever bigger digital files to one another over the ‘net, I’m delighted to have access to this kind of speed and am already fully utilizing it.

One thing most small business miss when they begin to use all of these new online services and applications: you run out of bandwidth very, very fast. Now that we’re delivering webinars, are using webcams, Skype, and Vonage in the office, we’ve been noticing that our need for bandwidth to satisfy all users of our connection has increased dramatically in the last six months. I believe that our ability to have sufficient bandwidth for all of these activities simultaneously has become a business imperative.

…  [Read More…]